Weight a Second, is Childhood Obesity a Problem?

Preventing childhood obesity helps protect your child from getting health problems in the future.

Childhood obesity is quickly becoming a major, if not the primary, health issue in our country. Pediatric obesity rates have tripled in the last three decades. Few people are surprised by this.

Treating and preventing childhood obesity helps protect your child from getting health problems in the future. Obesity is associated with many conditions. These include high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, and breathing problems such as asthma.

The issue comes down to lifestyle and environment. Different people have different metabolisms. But as a society, our genetics have not changed. We have the same genes we did in the 1950s. What has changed is the food we eat, how much we eat, and our activity.

Not only do we consume more calories than we need, but the wrong type of calories. For example, the amount of sugar we consume steadily rose from the 1950s until 2000. Sugar consumption has dropped slightly since then, thanks to increased awareness and education. However, this does not consider the consumption of simple carbohydrates like grains and corn products. They remain a large part of our diet as we consume more quick and processed foods.

These types of food are rapidly digested and absorbed into our bloodstream. This leads to a rapid rise in our blood sugar levels. Our body’s response is to secrete more insulin to store the extra energy. This pathway is how our ancestors survived periods of famine and harsh times. Insulin signals to the body that we have more calories than we need, so our body stores them for winter. Fat is one of the most efficient storage molecules so much of the extra energy gets stored as fat. This is great when winter is coming, but we no longer have times when food is scarce.

The other problem is the rebound effect. Insulin drops our blood sugar levels. Then we are hungry again and the cycle continues. The higher the carbohydrate intake, the higher the secretion of insulin. This in turn leads to a more dramatic drop in blood sugar and stronger cravings for more carbohydrates. As this cycle repeats itself, we experience daily excessive caloric intake.

What can be done? There is no way to change our bodies’ response to the types of food we eat. So we must modify what and how much we eat. This is obviously challenging and much harder than taking a pill. The good news is that once your body gets used to appropriate meal sizes and a healthy food balance, the cravings for excessive carbohydrates decrease. I teach children and their families some basic principles that can help reduce the excessive intake issue:

Reduce portion sizes. The goal of each meal should be to only eat when you are hungry. Really hungry. Stop eating before you are full. Try stopping at satisfied. Learn to recognize the change going from “starving” to “satisfied.” If you can walk away from food at this point it helps your body to stop eating for pleasure or out of habit and to eat only because you need to. If you eat until you are full or stuffed, then you have consumed too much, and the storage cycle begins.

Drink only water. A healthy habit is to drink when thirsty and eat when hungry. Zero-calorie drinks are not bad, but it is ideal to get your body used to having thirst quenched by water alone. This helps reduce the craving for taste which can often translate into decreased caloric intake.

Choose healthier foods. Complex carbohydrates (most vegetables) and lean proteins are good sources of nutrition and will help you feel full with less total caloric intake. Also, these foods are digested more slowly so our blood sugar levels do not spike like they do with simple carbohydrates. This reduces the whole storage cycle problem and keeps you feeling satisfied longer.

Increase physical activity. Our bodies are designed to be active. Regular activity and exercise create healthy dietary appetites and help our bodies stay balanced. I recommend an activity that raises your heartrate and gets you breathing harder for 20-30 minutes 4-5 times a week.

Intermittent fasting. This approach has proven to be effective in reducing total caloric intake. It is unknown what the safe guidelines for children and adolescents are. I recommend that people under 18 follow this principle but not to the extremes that adults do. Usually eating a later breakfast, sometimes 2 or 3 hours after waking up, and not consuming any calories after dinner is enough of a break from food to help reduce caloric intake and keep the body satisfied with a normal amount of food.

If you have concerns about your child’s weight, please talk to your pediatrician or make an appointment for further evaluation at our Saint Alphonsus Pediatric Specialty Clinic in Boise.

---